Edna Longley

Edna Longley teaches at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her book Poetry in the Wars was reviewed by Patricia Craig on 19 February.

Letter

One is Enough

9 March 1995

Ian Hamilton makes a mystery out of a molehill when he asks: ‘Why did Louis MacNeice have to wait thirty years for a biography?’ Anthony Thwaite (Letters, 23 March) also worries unnecessarily. There was no censorship. Some delay was certainly due to the sensitivities surrounding a once-divorced, once-separated man, who died prematurely and had a child by each marriage. Indeed, Jon Stallworthy still...
Letter

Call me Longley

8 October 1992

I was gratified by Tom Paulin’s regret (LRB, 8 October) at my absence from Patricia Craig’s Rattle of the North: An Anthology of Ulster Prose, even if he phrased that regret in rather patronising terms. (This is the second occasion on which an Irish male contributor to your pages has seen fit to call me simply ‘Edna’.) However, born and reared in Dublin, I had no expectation of being included....
Letter

Irish Writing

9 January 1992

Padraig O Conchuir (Letters, 13 February) wilfully misrepresents not only my attitude, but that of the School of English at Queen’s University, to the Irish language. We offer an ‘MA in English (Irish Writing)’, rather than one in ‘Anglo-Irish Writing’, because the hyphenated term carries excess historical baggage. Students entering an English Department, as opposed to the University’s...
Letter
Christopher Ricks and George Sterner might spare themselves some agony if they revised downwards their overall estimate of Eliot’s writings. Ricks’s tortuous argument in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice puts polyitlla in the crack running up the wall instead of investigating the human and artistic foundations: ‘the matter of anti-semitism has a particular importance because it cannot be isolated from...
Letter
SIR: Like Denis Donoghue, I am interested in Irishness ‘only if it is construed as a consequence of forces historical, social, religious, economic and so forth’. Unfortunately, because ‘Irish’ as a political term is narrower than ‘Irish’ as a descriptive term, construers often neglect the particular combination of forces which acted on Louis MacNeice and his poetry. Thus essentialism may...

Weasel, Magpie, Crow: Edward Thomas

Mark Ford, 1 January 2009

‘Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou!’ Verlaine resonantly, and eloquently, declared in his ‘Art poétique’ of 1874. The line must have lodged in...

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Like the trees on Primrose Hill

Samuel Hynes, 2 March 1989

In ‘The Cave of Making’, his elegy for MacNeice, Auden describes his friend as a ‘lover of women and Donegal’. The geography seems a bit wrong – the Irish counties...

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Green War

Patricia Craig, 19 February 1987

Wars and battles: these words, appearing prominently in the titles of two of the books under consideration, might give the impression that poetry, or criticism, or the criticism of poetry, is a...

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Valorising Valentine Brown

Patricia Craig, 5 September 1985

In a recent Times article, Philip Howard pounced on the deplorable word ‘Valorisation’ which seems to be trying to edge its way into the English language. ‘To enhance the price,...

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